Confessions of a Curious World

Believe it or not, I was somewhat relieved when I found out that this little, but extremely technologically advanced, piece of equipment was the culprit behind Google map's "street view". To be honest, though I've known about it and it has been around for some time now, I was always more of a mapquest person myself and I've only recently been exploring the amazing technology that is "street view".

My roommate was showing me her home across the country, and I too found myself viewing places that are near and dear to my heart. It was all jolly fun and brought smiles to both of our faces until one crucial question came to my mind: how are they getting these images? The fact that we used to have a basketball hoop in our driveway is now information that is available to the entire world. Not that I care about our basketball hoop, but what I care about is that people can see. If people can get 10 megapixel pictures of the outside of my house that means they can see through windows, they can potentially see what I own, they know what my house looks like. They can know the fact that our sprinklers were broken for a while, the fact that our garden gate is not always closed and... never locked. This can all be seen from a "sleepy little website" which just this month overtook mapquest in popularity.

I just described the scariness of the ever watchful eye of a curious world, so you might be wondering what this feeling of (at least temporary) relief is that I mentioned in the beginning. This is a highly technological camera in a highly technologically advanced program. But it must be manned. That is to say, (that I know of) there is no remote or automatic way of getting street view for google maps. It takes someone getting in a car and driving to each and every location and capturing one single image of it. Yeah it's a little scary that they have a detailed picture of my house... but it's an old picture. Our cars aren't even in the driveway so the world at least doesn't know what cars we drive. What I fear is not necessarily the situation because it takes time and money and a lot of work to get one snapshot of one little moment of time. What I fear is the way it could be in a couple of years.

Technology is advancing faster than we can make laws for it. This is objectively scary. We don't know what to do with technology that can invade people's privacy because the definition of privacy seems to be changing with time. We have to stare into the future and expect the worst: real time observation of our lives outside our front doors and garages. My dad was born in Cuba and was fortunate enough to get out before it was too late, but as Castro was rapidly taking power and seizing the assets of the people and removing their freedom, one of the first things that he did included an invasion of privacy. Loyalists (or people who were paid-off to do so) would be stationed at every street and would keep a log of the going ins and coming outs of the surrounding community. I don't have anything to hide but I have something to protect and that is my freedom and my constitutional rights.